1. Field
One or more embodiments of the present invention relates to a scalable video coding method and apparatus, and a scalable video decoding method and apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Scalable video coding (SVC) is a technique of coding video into a bitstream having a plurality of layers. If a bitstream is scalable video coded, a decoding unit can decode the bitstream by using layers selected from among a plurality of layers of the coded bitstream. Such a bitstream includes a base layer and one or more enhancement layers. The base layer bitstream is a fundamental bitstream, and the original video can be reconstructed using the base layer bitstream. However, this results in the quality of the reconstructed video being low.
If the base layer bitstream and an enhancement layer bitstream are used together, the quality of the reconstructed video is improved. In this case, only the base layer bitstream or both the base layer bitstream and the enhancement layer bitstream are decoded depending on an available transmission bandwidth.
SVC has been actively used in various video compression techniques, such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.263, and H.264, and is expected to be applied to various video codecs henceforth.